Press Play: Time Travel Via Cassette

So, I just watched Press Play on Hulu.  I don't know why I didn't come across this movie sooner.  It has the two most important elements in my pop cultural life, time travel and music, and, you know, it's quite good.

[Some spoilers ahead ... ]

Here's the set-up:  Laura meets Harrison in a vinyl and cassette shop in Hawaii run by Cooper (played by Danny Glover).  They both have a love of mixtapes, and fall in love.  Then, four years after Harrison is killed on the way to surfing by a car, Laura discovers that she can go back in time, to before Harrison was killed, every time she plays a song on a mixtape that she and Harrison were making.  When the song ends, she's back in the future in which Harrison was killed four years earlier.  She warns Harrison to be careful about that car, but he dies anyway in a different accident. So, the gist is: Laura can change only the circumstances of Harrison's death, not his death itself.

That's a pretty nice set-up writers James Bachelor and Greg Björkman put together.  Glover is always good to see on the screen.  Clara Rugaard was winsome and winning as Laura, and Lewis Pullman was sensitive and cerebral as Harrison (first time I've seen Rugaard, and Pullman was good in Outer Range).  The music was appealing, too, and new to me.

Now, I generally prefer science fiction to science fantasy -- in time travel, that would be a time machine vs. click your heels together -- but Press Play had such a sweetness, a refreshing innocence, that I'm fine with its fantasy.  It kept within the contours of its story -- music takes us back in time, all the time, in our minds, so why not play with the fantastical possibility that it can also take us back in time in reality -- and the ending was ...

Well, see it yourself, and see if you agree with me that the ending was right.

alternate reality about The Beatles on Amazon, and  FREE on Vocal

The Old Man and the Gun: Don't Retire

So, right in the middle of a fabulous little squall on Cape Cod last night, which knocked over chairs and an umbrella stand on our deck, my wife and I watched The Old Man and the Gun on HBO.  The squall was more exciting, but The Old Man starring Robert Redford had it beat hands down in sheer charm and style, and was much more enjoyable in its understated beauty.

The signature of Forrest Tucker, the real life bank robber and escape artist portrayed in this movie, was his smile -- at least in this movie.  And who else on this planet to better play a charming, smiling bank robber than Redford?  He announced after completion of the movie in August of last year that he was retiring from acting.  Here's a strong hope that he shouldn't.

Sissy Spacek, who isn't retiring, was a great recipient of Tucker/Redford's charm.   In fact, the two make one of the best couples I've seen in a while in a movie.  And, refreshingly, she's not like Bonnie with Clyde.  Instead, she provides a sensible, caring restraint on Tucker, who, however, can't resist his larcenous influences for too long.

Good supporting acting from Casey Affleck, Danny Glover, and Tom Waits, along with a comfortable early 1980s ambience, make all of this a pleasure to see.   Tucker wasn't quite Robin Hood - he generally kept his ill-gotten gains to himself - but I've always had a soft spot for a thief with a heart, and Redford with his winning smile brings him home to us just perfectly.

 

Touch: Fractals, Heroes, and 24

Touch joins Awake as one of the most intelligent shows on television - with heart and soul as well as intellect - refreshing, very complex, provocative, and altogether welcome.

Two great forces of popular culture come to bear in Touch - Kiefer Sutherland, who looks and sounds almost exactly the same as 24's Jack Bauer on Touch, and creator Tim Kring, who brought us Heroes.

Kiefer plays Martin Bohm, father of 10-year old Jake, who's mute and diagnosed as autistic, but is much much more.   Jake does have an incredible memory - like the classic idiot savant - but he also can see, intuit, understand the fractal nature of the universe, or the interconnected patterns of everything around us.  This part of the story - fractals - is science not science fiction.  Why, for example, do leafs and bird wings have the same patterns, when they have no evolutionary connection?   The universe, it seems, offers up a given series of templates - which harken, in a sense, to Plato's ideal forms.

But Jake sees much more than this, and here is where the wonder and amazement of science fiction come in.  Not only is Jake sympatico with fractals, but with quantum mechanics, and the part of it that compresses past, present, and future into an omnipresent now.   In plain English, Jake not only sees the interconnections, but where they can lead.   His chosen job is to get silent word out about bad futures to his father, so Martin can do something to avert them.

The pilot has two distinct stories, both connected via Martin, otherwise distinct from each other.  One concerns a smart phone that someone loses at the airport, which Martin gets his hands on, but before he can return to the owner,  gets called away to help get Jake down from a steep construction site on which he has climbed.  Good thing, too, because that phone set loose in the world eventually leads to stopping a suicide bomber, and making a singer famous.   The other plot concerns a firefighter who almost saved Jake's mother's (Martin's wife's) life on 9/11, and has felt guilty about that ever since.  Jake's interventions lead to a school bus of kids saved and the firefighter reclaiming his sense of self-worth.  Both of these happy endings follow a long series of apparently unrelated events, and the fun  is in seeing how these events all tie into one another - see, that is, what Jake already knows.

Meanwhile, Martin learns more of what's happening in Jake's head from Arthur Teller (Danny Glover), a sage old guy in the Bronx.   With Martin now realizing at least part of what Jake is up to do, the stage is set for some wild, complicated stories in which Martin tries to pick up on Jake's leads to shape the future.

Heroes meets 24?   That's just the past, Touch is the future, and I'm looking forward to more (including that 24 movie which is somewhere still to be made).

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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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